The Stepford Wives (DVD)

The second screen adaptation of Ira Levin's best-selling novel (the first, starring Katherine Ross, was made in 1974) is a darkly satirical comedy, in contrast to the paranoid social critique of the first version. Nicole Kidman stars as Joanna Eberhart, a wildly successful New York career woman who, after suffering a nervous breakdown, moves with her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) from Manhattan to the peaceful suburban community of Stepford, Connecticut, where everything is chic, polished, and a little too perfect for Joanna. She soon strikes up a friendship with cynical and irreverent Jewish writer Bobbie Markowitz (Bette Midler) - and together the two women discover the ominous secret that underpins the social fabric of the too-good-to-be-true community in which they find themselves.